Sacramento County's Jail System Master Planning Update continues...

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Sacramento County conducted a "listening" session on August 27th about the future of its jail. Eric Jones and Laura Foster from the County's Public Safety and Justice Agency conducted this session, which occurred because the County lost a federal lawsuit--the Mays Decision--for mistreating prisoners. The mistreatment reportedly continues; for one example, jailers have denied inmates their prescribed medications. 

A recent state Supreme Court decision restricting the use of cash bail is a significant change in California's incarceration policies. The Bee reports 74% of the inmates in County jail are not convicted of anything except being unable to afford bail, so reducing bail could potentially make the jail a lot less crowded and might discredit any advocacy for increasing its size to accommodate more prisoners. 

Said the Bee, the defendant in the Supreme Court suit, Gerald Kowalczyk, "challenged the ruling while in custody, but by the time the courts got around to it, he had already been in jail, waiting for his day in court, for six months." Kowalczyk was homeless and indigent, but was jailed because he couldn't pay bail when he was arrested for using a found credit card to purchase a cheeseburger. 

The state Supreme Court ruled in Kowalczyk's favor, and since that ruling, the Bee reports that average bail has already gone from $5,000 to $1,000 in San Mateo County.  

The Bee adds, "In [this] ruling, the California Supreme Court cast the state's existing use of bail as a criminalization of poverty [validating this study] and declared, 'a court that intentionally sets objectively unattainable bail inevitably does so for the purpose of detention.'

"The court ruled that judges cannot use money bail as a de facto detention mechanism. It also said lower-level offenses can be dealt with through alternative means like monitoring, mandatory check-ins and 'reasonably attainable' money bail."

When asked about this decision's local impact, Ms. Foster, one of the facilitators for the "listening" session, replied it had only reduced the Sacramento County jail's population by 10%, so we couldn't count on it reducing the need for more jail capacity. The Supreme Court reached the Kowalczyk decision April 30, 2026, so the County has had four months to integrate the decision into its practices. Perhaps the County is waiting for its "day in court" to revise unaffordable bail amounts still in force. 

In the bigger picture, the US currently incarcerates people at five times the world's per capita average, seven times more than Canada. And Canadians have lower crime rates than the US. In any case, reducing the jail population by 80% would normalize US detention, compared to the world's average. Meanwhile, the World Population Review says, "The US crime rate is higher than most other developed nations." 

So all that incarceration doesn't produce the "safety" this Master Planning session cited as a motivation to consider expanding the jail itself. There's no sign the County considers bigger jails may even generate more crime.

Meanwhile, the public's appetite for "safety" appears to be infinite, but not necessarily sensible. One example, from Shankar Vedantam's The Hidden Brain:  

"...researchers Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay once examined all gun-related deaths over a lengthy period of time in King County in the state of Washington. They were trying to find evidence for the common intuition that gun owners are safer because they can protect themselves and their families should someone break into their homes. Kellermann and Reay identified nine deaths during the period of the study where people shot and killed an intruder. These are the stories that gun advocates endlessly relate to one another. In the same period, guns in people's homes were implicated in twelve accidental deaths and forty-one homicides--usually family members shooting one another. The number of suicides? Three hundred and thirty-three."

Vedantam compares this counterfactual appetite for safety to driving 70MPH on the freeway without a seatbelt. As long as your hands are on the wheel, you may feel safe, especially compared to how you feel sitting in a plane piloted by someone else through turbulent air. But the feeling is deceptive. The reality is that you're safer in the plane. Appealing to perceived "safety" is marketing, not reality.

Since modern politics focuses on marketing rather than facts, cops, courts, and cages will likely continue to produce more criminals, and scare the public into timid compliance with the political class until inconvenient reality inevitably asserts itself. 

Given the public's gullibility, Sacramento's reliance on ever more draconian penalties, unpayable bail, and homeless "sweeps" is likely to continue, criminalizing the poverty that is at the root of the largest homeless population since the Great Depression. Count on Sacramento's public officials crying crocodile tears over their helplessness to solve the same problem the New Deal solved roughly a century ago. 

For more information about the Jail System Master Planning effort and to review previous presentations and materials, visit the Public Safety and Justice Agency's Reports and Resources webpage. To see the August 27 webinar, see it on YouTube.